‘In the Big House,’ ‘Mob Wives’ and ‘Mobster Confessions’

Not in the way that the mob might control your local garbage-hauling or loan-sharking business. It has taken over television in that every time you turn the dang thing on some mobster, former mobster, dead mobster or ex-wife of a mobster is yak yak yaking. Who killed the code of silence?

The latest addition to the Mafia gabfest is “In the Big House,” a witless reality show that has its premiere Monday night on Logo. It involves a family whose patriarch is Lou Verdi, who the show’s publicity material says “was involved in organized crime as part of the Bruno crime family” in Philadelphia. He ran a bar that was a front for assorted illegal activities, we’re told, and has logged time in prison.

On this show, though, he is logging time with his family: his former wife, Dotsie; their daughter, Michel, a hard-nosed businesswoman; and their gay son, Louis Jr. The gimmick, besides that everyone in the family tries to be comically unpleasant but fails, is that Big Lou is going to help Michel and her husband, Jay, run a gay bar.

Between his gay son and the gay bar, the old mobster has a lot of gayness to process, which isn’t nearly as amusing as it’s supposed to be. The senior Mr. Verdi’s attempts at witty remarks about sexuality, his son and such aren’t very witty, and no one else in the family is any more adept at snappy repartee.

But at least Big Lou isn’t holding forth about his crimes (in the premiere anyway). Elsewhere across the television spectrum people with mob ties can’t stop talking about their misdeeds.

The Discovery Channel, for instance, recently floated a couple of episodes of something called “Mobster Confessions,” in which informants talk in detail about their illegal activities and their fellow mobsters. The series is now suspended, but before the hiatus it gave us a good look at Bill Cutolo Jr. and Frank Calabrese Jr. — both sons of prominent mobsters who tried the life for themselves before ratting.

Photo

Lou Verdi, a former convict from Philadelphia, now leads a family trying to run a gay bar on “In the Big House,” on Logo.Credit
Logo

Investigation Discovery, meanwhile, is about to begin the second season of “I Married a Mobster,” in which women who were romantically involved with organized-crime figures spill the beans. Some of these women broke almost as many laws as their men and are happy to tell you so. They generally seem smarter than the ladies of VH1’s wretched “Mob Wives” franchise, which also features women connected to bad guys, but the bottom line is, they weren’t smart enough not to become involved with criminals.

If this onslaught weren’t enough, one of the Biography Channel’s favorite ways to fill time is endlessly running episodes of the documentary series “Mobsters,” each of which tells the story of some criminal type, often deceased, through the recollections of those who ran with him or chased after him.

There is, for instance, “Mobsters: Paul Castellano” from Season 1, in which we learn not only about Mr. Castellano, a crime boss who was shot to death in Manhattan in 1985, but also about a fellow mobster who earned the nickname Quack Quack because of his propensity for flapping his gums. Let’s picture the annual Mafia meeting at which the top bosses award nicknames:

Boss 1: “So, whaddah we gonna do about all these younger guys who talk too much?”

Boss 2: “Howzabout we give one of them a humiliating nickname? That’ll send a message just like when we FedEx a dead fish to somebody.”

Boss 1: “I like it. Maybe something like Quack Quack?”

That apparently didn’t have the desired deterrent effect, and now we have an era in which we’re getting to know our mobsters far more intimately than is healthy. This isn’t to argue that former criminals shouldn’t be allowed to trade on their past crimes to achieve reality-television stardom, although that argument could be made. The concern here is that the end of the code of silence is sapping the underworld of its mystique.

It used to be that ordinary people weren’t even sure the Mafia existed and thus could easily, and eagerly, accept stories that made mobsters out to be slick, well-dressed masterminds. Now the actual mobsters who are all over television are showing that most of these crime lords are just thugs. How can you suspend your disbelief and enjoy the zippy dialogue and fast-moving plots of “Mob Doctor,” a new Fox drama this fall about a woman who serves the medical needs of her local Mafia, when a few channels away is a living reminder that real mobsters are generally shallow, boring and not very bright?

The premiere of “In the Big House,” oddly, has a code-of-silence theme, not in relation to ratting out fellow mobsters, but in relation to a surprise party that ends up not being a surprise. The episode’s references to the code of silence prove that some memory of omertà still exists out there in mob land, in the same way that a core wilderness survival instinct is buried deep in the DNA of even a fifth-generation city dweller.

So maybe there is still hope that mobsters will rediscover the old ways and shut the heck up.

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Code of Silence Finds Its Voice On Reality TV. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe